Jesus Dying in Your Place Was Invented 1000 Years After Jesus
Deconstructing Christianity: Many atonement-related concepts were invented long after Jesus. His substitutionary atonement was one of them.
Anselm of Canterbury was abbot of the monastery and school at Bec in Normandy before he was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury in 1093. Anselm would be included among those scholars who exemplified the medieval dialectical approach to learning known as scholasticism, which sought to harmonize various re-emergent authorities in the intellectual world. He held that faith necessarily precedes reason, but that reason can also expand upon faith.
Among his important contributions to Christian thought, Anselm provided one particularly far-reaching and spiritually unhealthy theological concept. While the New Testament refers to Jesus’ death as “for us,” and as a “sacrifice,” atonement was not a central issue for early Christians. References to atonement provided a theological basis for moving beyond a sense of guilty sinfulness and mastering behavior as a follower of Christ.
Four hundred years after Jesus and six hundred years before Anselm, Augustine’s doctrine of original sin took the mere physical death associated with Adam and replaced it with eternal damnation. This had implications for shifting atonement to a central position in Christianity. (See my post: Eternal Damnation Was Invented 400 Years After Jesus.) But for Augustine, Christ’s suffering was only substitutionary in the sense that Christ had overcome on our behalf as a gift of love to us. By the time of Anselm six hundred years on, the overt centering of Jesus as God’s victim of extreme violence, to symbolize the institutional church as the only means of deliverance in the hereafter, had branded crucifixion onto popular consciousness as the symbol of Christianity. (See my post How Crucifixion Took Center Stage 700 Years After the Gospels.)
It was Anselm’s 1097 book, Cur Deus Homo? (Why a God-Man?) that introduced the satisfaction view of atonement. For the first time, more than a thousand years into the Christian era, it articulates a directly substitutionary understanding of New Testament language concerning atonement, explicitly stating that the purpose of the incarnation was so that Jesus could satisfy God’s retributive justice by paying the price for our sins. It should be understood that this substitutionary view is a postbiblical construction retrofitted to scripture.
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Atonement most certainly runs throughout the Bible. It includes both ancient sacrifices, as well as Jesus’ crucifixion by way of analogy. The basic idea behind atonement is giving a gift to restore a relationship after some offense. What Anselm introduced was the notion of substitutionary satisfaction as a requirement. This is like saying that an ancient Israelite rightly should have been slaughtered on the altar in place of a sacrificial offering, but that YHVH was willing to allow for an animal to be substituted for them instead. Nowhere in the Hebrew Bible is this articulated.
In the story of Abraham sacrificing Isaac (Genesis 22), Isaac is replaced by a ram. The main points of the story are that YHVH expects obedience, YHVH expects sacrifices, YHVH provides what is needed for sacrifices, and YHVH does not want people to sacrifice their children. It is clear in the story that YHVH does not intend for Isaac to be sacrificed, and that an animal is a proper sacrifice, while a human being is not. (Don’t be like the Ammonite worshippers of Molech who sacrifice their children.) Projecting substitutionary satisfaction onto atonement because a ram is ‘substituted’ for Isaac distorts the story of Abraham and Isaac; and more importantly, is inconsistent with the rest of scripture.
A sacrifice is literally a holy offering. Ritual sacrifices in the Hebrew Bible were understood and depicted as gifts to God offered for a long list of possible reasons. These include purification following an event we would consider medical, and regularly making relationally restorative amends for wrongdoing, individual and collective. Some sacrifices naturally involved a lot of blood, and as described in scripture, the blood of atonement was handled in highly ritualized ways.
The author of Hebrews, writing of Jesus’ death, equates it with these ancient sacrifices and argues for the superiority of Jesus’ death as a sacrifice. Ephesians 5 opens with the admonition to walk in love in imitation of Christ, whose death was a fragrant, restorative offering of himself to God out of love for us. Romans 5 states that Christ died for us even as sinners out of God’s love for us. Note that in these examples, Jesus’ death is made analogous to a sacrifice, given out of love, as a relationally restorative gift on our behalf, not as a substitution. Sacrifices throughout the Bible are depicted as offerings, given in holy fear, worship, and gratitude.
In First Corinthians 5, Paul metaphorically admonishes people not to be boastful, puffed up, leavened bread, but humble, unleavened bread. He extends the metaphor by association to the Passover, declaring that since Christ the Passover lamb (which shields God’s people from the power of death) has been sacrificed (made a holy offering) on our behalf, we should celebrate the festival in our own lives, not with the yeast of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth. There is no substitutionary satisfaction in this passage.
The metaphor of a lamb led to the slaughter or silent before its shearers is still apt for Jesus before his accusers, as is the spotlessness of a sacrificial lamb for Jesus’ blamelessness. Note that neither expresses substitution. The assertion of John the Baptist that Jesus is “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” remains apt for those who are transformed by following Jesus, and who work toward and await the restoration of creation, even if Jesus was not substituting himself as the object of God’s supposed violent rage against us. The Bible is full of atoning sacrifices as relationship-restoring gifts to God; the Bible is altogether lacking in atoning sacrifices where it is a human being who belongs on the altar, or someone other than Jesus on the cross, even though this notion is still proclaimed in some traditions.
The Suffering Servant
The Epistle to the Romans, the Acts of the Apostles, and the gospels of Matthew and John all contain quotations from the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah. It is part of a poem known as the Suffering Servant. The fourth verse of Isaiah 53 is quoted in Matthew 8 concerning Jesus casting out demons and curing the sick: “This was to fulfill what had been spoken through the prophet Isaiah, ‘He took our infirmities and carried away our diseases.’”
The most extensive New Testament quote from Isaiah 53 is in the eighth chapter of Acts. In it, the Suffering Servant is interpreted as referring to Jesus. As the story is told in Acts, the author references verses seven and eight:
Now there was an Ethiopian eunuch, a court official of the Candace, queen of the Ethiopians, in charge of her entire treasury. He had come to Jerusalem to worship and was returning home; seated in his chariot, he was reading the prophet Isaiah. Then the Spirit said to Philip, “Go over to this chariot and join it.” So Philip ran up to it and heard him reading the prophet Isaiah. He asked, “Do you understand what you are reading?” He replied, “How can I, unless someone guides me?” And he invited Philip to get in and sit beside him. Now the passage of the scripture that he was reading was this:
“Like a sheep he was led to the slaughter,
and like a lamb silent before its shearer,
so he does not open his mouth.
In his humiliation justice was denied him.
Who can describe his generation?
For his life is taken away from the earth.”
The eunuch asked Philip, “About whom, may I ask you, does the prophet say this, about himself or about someone else?” Then Philip began to speak, and starting with this scripture, he proclaimed to him the good news about Jesus.
This passage illustrates the midrashic approach to commentary on Hebrew scripture in the context of Jesus’ life and teaching that characterized the early Christian movement. The Hebrew poem of the Suffering Servant is found in Isaiah 52:13–53:12. It is the fourth of four “servant songs” in this portion of Isaiah. Christians almost universally understand it as referring to Jesus, and for good reason, given its quotation in the New Testament. To properly understand the poem, it is necessary to know the circumstances of its writing and its significance for its original audience, as related to its meaning for Jewish people today.
The portion of Isaiah that includes the servant songs (chapters 40-55) dates from the Babylonian exile of the Jewish people during the sixth century BCE. Writer and readers alike would have lived in poverty and powerlessness as captives in a foreign land. The collective people of Israel are referred to in the singular many times in the Hebrew Bible. The consensus from the earliest commentary down to the present day is that the suffering servant is a metaphor for the Jewish people. It is one of many examples in the Hebrew Bible of God’s people suffering calamity because of their collective unrighteousness.
It is also important to note that the Hebrew language describing the suffering servant is all about sickness, shunning, and mistreatment. During the latter half of the nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth, a politically corrupt and militarily weak, invaded and exploited China was derisively referred to in several sources as “the sick man of Asia” or some variation. This parallels the way the Jewish people are metaphorically depicted in the suffering servant.
In apparent eagerness to support the passage as being about Jesus, Christian scholars have maintained a mistranslation of the Hebrew as referring to griefs and sorrows, presumably over being tortured and crucified, when the actual terms are related to pain, sickness, ostracism, and mistreatment. The Hebrew unequivocally paints a picture of someone suffering—smitten by Elohim—with the pains of infirmity, illness, disease, wounds, and unsightly disfigurement. It is a portrait of a sick and disabled person being shunned, ignored, and mistreated.
Modern Christian translations tend to weasel out of this by hewing to Christian tradition with crucifixion-related words while footnoting more accurate, illness-related terms as ‘alternatives’. To its credit, in the NRSV the poetry of verses 4 and 5 reads:
Surely he has borne our infirmities
and carried our diseases;
yet we accounted him stricken,
struck down by Elohim, and afflicted.
But he was wounded for our transgressions,
crushed for our iniquities;
upon him was the punishment that made us whole,
and by his bruises we are healed.
It is clear in the Hebrew that the suffering servant is the people of Judah, diseased and mistreated, bearing both the sickness and the abuse suffered by the reading audience as a result of their transgressions and iniquities, not as the appointed punishment-bearer in their stead. The suffering servant is the Jewish people, suffering the consequences of their collective sin, becoming whole through their ordeal.
There is no question that the Suffering Servant has functioned from the very beginning of Christianity as a heart-wrenching metaphor for the suffering of Jesus, sacrificed as our relationship-restoring atonement. It is also true that every metaphor has its limits. Christians, both Catholic and Protestant, have taken the substitutionary satisfaction view of atonement articulated a thousand years after Jesus and the apostles, and read it into this scripture, making it serve as justification for that view. This does not reflect an accurate handling of the word of truth, even if it still is a widespread and standard interpretation within traditional Christianity.
Maintaining this interpretation requires assuming the dysfunctional theology of an exacting and cruel God whose grace is somehow delimited by the need to punish. This cannot be considered actual grace in any sense. While some passages depict a wrathful YHVH, and while there certainly are fathers who behave in this way toward their children, such a theology hardly reflects Jesus’ words and teachings about God as a loving Father. When something Jesus says, teaches or exemplifies appears to contradict something found elsewhere in scripture or tradition, Christians faithful to Jesus as the living Word are compelled to regard his sayings and example as superseding and outmoding what scripture or some traditional interpretation of it seems to say.
Jesus’ horrifying crucifixion recast as a love-motivated holy offering of atonement? Yes. Jesus as the object of vicarious substitutionary penal satisfaction? No. Scripture can be mistranslated and misinterpreted to support such a notion, but with a careful, accurate reading of scripture, it cannot be found there. Christianity needs to come clean about this.